Amazon Announces General Availability of CloudFront

Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of its content delivery Web service. Called CloudFront, Amazon's new service is aimed at giving businesses and developers an available platform for delivery content such as video with low data and high transfer speeds.

CloudFront works with Amazon's core Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and Simple Storage Service (S3) but is aimed at delivering static and streaming content. Much like content delivery networks (CDNs), CloudFront automatically routes objects to the nearest edge location.

According to Amazon, there are nine edge locations throughout the United States, four in Europe and three in Asia. Amazon has released an application programming interface (API) for CloudFront that enables content distribution over the service.

Perhaps most noteworthy: CloudFront will come with service level agreements, noted Jeff Barr, Amazon's lead Web services evangelist in a blog post Monday. "If availability of your content drops below 99.9 percent in any given month, you can apply for a service credit equal to 10 percent of your monthly bill," he wrote. "If the availability drops below 99 percent you can apply for a service credit equal to 25 percent of your monthly bill."

Like EC2 and S3, CloudFront is a self-service offering that customers pay based on usage and doesn't require long-term commitments. Pricing starts at 15 cents per Gigabyte per month for the first 10 Terabytes, and scales down to 3 cents for a Petabyte or more. Rates are higher in Asia.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.